Garmin has spent the better part of a decade building Applied Ballistics into its devices. Now it owns the company.
Garmin Ltd. has acquired Applied Ballistics, the Howard City, Michigan, firm known for producing ballistic solvers and projectile data-driven firing solutions for competitive shooters, hunters and long-range shooters. No financial terms were disclosed.
“Applied Ballistics is a natural complement to Garmin’s outdoor and tactical product portfolio,” Garmin Co-Chief Operating Officer Brad Trenkle said. He added that the deal brings the company’s software, proprietary projectile data and firing solutions under Garmin’s roof.
Anyone who has shot a precision rifle match lately has likely seen the partnership up close. Garmin’s Foretrex line has become a trusted piece of kit in Precision Rifle Series and Extreme Long-Range competition, and that relationship started on a firing line. The Foretrex 701 Ballistic Edition made its first appearance at the 2017 King of 2 Miles, and since then, the solver has spread across the lineup, from the Foretrex 901 Ballistic Edition and tactix 7 Pro Ballistics Edition to Tactical Edition versions of the Instinct 3. The tactix 8 arrived in February 2025, launching alongside the AB Quantum app, which lets users manage rifle profiles, targets and ballistic data from a phone.
What Garmin is really buying is the math, and the data underneath it. Bryan Litz, an aerospace engineer and champion long-range and ELR competitor, founded Applied Ballistics and wrote “Applied Ballistics for Long Range Shooting,” a staple on serious long-range shooters’ bookshelves. His company’s crown jewel is a bullet library of thousands of projectiles, each with a custom drag model built from Doppler radar data.
Traditional ballistic coefficients boil a bullet’s flight down to a single number, measured against a standardized reference shape. Litz’s custom drag models are built from radar tracking of each specific bullet as it slows down. That includes the transonic zone, where a small error in the drag data can put a shot well off target.
Garmin has run this play before. In 2016, it bought mapping and GPS company DeLorme, maker of the inReach satellite communicator, and that technology now threads through Garmin’s outdoor line. Current Foretrex models can receive inReach text messages and trigger an interactive SOS when paired with a compatible device. Bringing Applied Ballistics in-house follows the same logic: own the brain, then put it in everything.
The precision rifle community has followed Litz for years, both through his research at Applied Ballistics and in competition at big ELR tournaments like King of 2 Miles. Much of that work already reaches shooters through Garmin devices, and the company says owning Applied Ballistics outright will speed up development of more integrated products for “customers who depend on accuracy.” In long-range shooting, that covers just about everyone.
